Disc Golf 3D Beta

Hello everyone! Free game up here for a while if anyone is interested in playing, feedback is appreciated but not required. Basically I converted Nova Golf from regular golf to Frisbee Golf. Some of you may be familiar or even play disc golf, but most will probably have not have heard of it.

Luckily most of the testing has already been done for Nova Golf 1.0 and its five major updates, so I don't expect tons of issues. I'm just curious if it's too hard, or if I missed anything else with my tunnel vision.

First thing you'll notice the player swings a club and a frisbee flies out. The artists are finishing up the throw animations, basket mode, icons, and a few other pieces of art.

Feedback is welcome! Unfortunately I doubt this will get released before iTunesConnect shuts down on the 21st, but should be sometime this month or early next month on the Mac and iOS.

Thanks and Enjoy!

EDIT : Developer mode is on so if you press a button and something random happens, that won't be in the final version ('i' takes you right to the pin :-P). In the career or proshop menu press the experience/credits button for free experience/credits if you want to have a decent character

Well, aside from my continual UI critiques , it feels awkward. With a golf ball, you can only aim Yaw and hit, but in a disc golf game I expect to be able to aim pitch and yaw with the mouse and choose the hyzer/anhyzer angle fluidly. The keyboard controls work, but are clunky.

Also, I find that if I'm not right next to the basket, aiming for it is overly difficult. I think one of the problems is figuring out the elevation for a shot. It isn't clear whether the flight indicator passes through the basket so it's not always easy enough to tell where on the basket I'm likely to hit. It seems to me that if the indicator hits an obstacle, it shouldn't display the rest of it until it hits the ground; It should just stop at where it collides so that collision is clearly visible.

Another problem is that the indicator draws on top of everything rather than in 3d space. See this image. Even though the indicator is trying to tell me the shot would land way beyond the basket, you can clearly see the landing circle drawn on top of the basket. The same goes for the part of the indicator which should be behind the basket. It's visually confusing. (Actually, now I see that with bushes it works mostly as expected.)

Thanks for the feedback! I'll do something for the throw disc angle, maybe a scroll wheel or a right click drag. I notice when watching people play the game they don't use the WASD keys or click the modifier buttons much, even though the tutorial text says to.

The flight path preview is calculated off-course so it will take some work to show object hits. I'm afraid if it shows collisions it will make the game too easy, whenever I go back to GL Golf it actually takes a little more work compared to Nova Golf with not having a flight path drawn on the screen

Good catch on the path overlapping the basket. I'm trying to figure out why I have depth testing disabled for that interaction to happen, I'll figure it out.

Just got the backhand throw animation and basket model, going to throw those in first.

I'm not much of fan of the flight path. It's like turning on the racing line, auto braking, and auto steering in racing games — what's the point of even playing? In the case of golf, it's pretty straight forward that a higher putter < iron < driver for distance, and higher numbers = higher loft, but in disc golf with each disc having different speed requirements, flight characteristics, and ways to throw, it's much more complex. I probably wouldn't show the entire flight path from throw to landing, but only the projected initial flight path. In real life, unless you make a perfect throw you don't know where it's going, and the somewhere-in-this-big-circle indicator is a too cheaty. Also, when cycling through the discs, a big temporary indicator image showing the flight characteristics would be good.

If it were me, I'd spend a lot more time thinking of the in-game mechanics of throwing. For example, rather than picking a bunch of angles and power and then the game throws the disc, perhaps there should be more "live" interaction with game during the throw. It'd take prototyping a few ideas to really find out which would work. Like, what about using the 2D movement of the mouse to control power and angle at the same time which would be throwing the disc while moving the mouse? Need a straight shot? Move the mouse straight on Y only. Need a hyzer? Make a curved 90 degree flick. The speed of the movement controls the speed of the throw. The consistency of the speed, and shape of the movement give you some variance. Some kind of skill is really needed to play. This would also translate really well into iOS.

Thanks for the additional feedback. The flight paths are almost like cheating, but fortunately there is enough random variation in the throws to make them not perfect. I'm changing the way they fade out, it won't give you as perfect of a idea anymore, especially before leveling up the character.

I also like the new input ideas. I've been toying with this for my other golf game too, I'd like to have a few options for input that the user can switch between. I enjoyed the input from the Tiger Woods iOS franchise. Sometimes the touch screen gimmicks can take away from the game though, and I wouldn't like to have to draw with a mouse on the mac to control my flight!

Haha Karl, it will be like the early pictures of wiimotes breaking TVS, iPhones breaking iMacs!